Lower Bounds for Polynomials with Simplex Newton Polytopes Based on Geometric Programming

Sadik Iliman, Timo de Wolff

Published 2014-02-25, updated 2015-02-07Version 3

In this article, we propose a geometric programming method in order to compute lower bounds for real polynomials. We provide new sufficient criteria for polynomials to be nonnegative as well as to have a sum of binomial squares representation. These criteria rely on the coefficients and the support of a polynomial. These generalize all previous criteria by Lasserre, Ghasemi, Marshall, Fidalgo and Kovacec to polynomials with arbitrary simplex Newton polytopes. This generalization yields a geometric programming approach for computing lower bounds for polynomials that significantly extends the geometric program proposed by Ghasemi and Marshall. Furthermore, it shows that geometric programming is strongly related to nonnegativity certificates based on sums of nonnegative circuit polynomials, which were recently introduced by the authors.